


Two Ships Passing

by Carmarthen



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Backstory, Canon Era, Gen, Preslash if you squint, Prison, Prison Escape, Translation Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-07 03:50:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/pseuds/Carmarthen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five worlds in which Javert and Valjean never met, and one where they did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1795. Faverolles

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Как в море корабли](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5162678) by [rose_rose (Escargot)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Escargot/pseuds/rose_rose)



> I realize that neither the AUs nor the canon quite qualify as "two ships passing" in the strict sense, but since the idea for this fic came out of that title, the title pretty much glommed on and I couldn't bring myself to change it.
> 
> Kind of a book/movie fusion of some kind.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished. He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy act; that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to him had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better to wait until he could get it through compassion or through work; that it is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one is hungry?"_
> 
> -Victor Hugo, _Les Misérables_ , Volume I, Book Second, Chapter VII "The Interior of Despair"

It was late on a Sunday evening when a man crossed the Place de l'Église of Faverolles. He walked with his head down and shoulders slumped as if weary, his long hair fallen loose from his queue and shading his face, his cap pulled down low over his eyes.

In front of the grated window of the baker’s shop he paused, looking in the window at the day-old bread, which would be given out to beggars soon enough if it did not sell. He knew the baker, Maubert Isabeau, a kind enough man, but a man who always had enough to eat; and he thought of his sister and the seven children waiting back at the cottage. Pierre was sick and had cried all day for food, but they had nothing in the house but a handful of beans and some thin broth from the carcass of a rabbit the man had shot the week before, all the while waiting for the shout of the gamekeeper and the sound of gendarmes come to clap him in irons.

Pierre would stop crying if he had bread, the man thought, but he had once again found no work. Was it right, that he, willing to work, could yet find no work, and so those who depended on him starved? Was it right that M. Isabeau should have so much, while he, Jean Valjean, and those who depended upon him had so little?

He regarded the bread again. He was a strong man. It would be an easy enough thing to thrust his fist through the grate, through the windowpane, to break it and clutch the bread to his breast and run.

And yet he thought of his sister’s weary face. If he were caught, what would become of her? What would become of the seven children?

He shuddered, imagining the shackle around his ankle, the red cap upon his head. There were worse things than honest poverty.

Jean Valjean hesitated a moment longer, his belly cramping with hunger, imagining little Pierre’s cries. But no: if he asked in the morning, surely M. Isabeau would give him the bread, or perhaps there would be some task he could perform in trade. Surely there would be work again soon. After all, it was very rare for someone to truly die of hunger, and if misery could be escaped through theft, there would be a great deal less misery.

No, in the morning he would knock on M. Isabeau’s door, cap in hand, like an honest man

The sad figure of Jean Valjean moved on across the square, the moment of madness past. What he might have lost if he succumbed did not cross his mind: he was not a man of great imagination. But when he returned to the cottage and found Pierre sleeping peacefully, and Jeanne ladled for him a bowl of bean soup with a bit of bacon in it that she had begged from a neighbor, he knew he had chosen the right path. It was better to be an honest man. 

Tomorrow there would surely be work.


	2. 1797. Marseille

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale of society, and he despaired of ever re-entering it. He observed that society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,—those who attack it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung. He entered the police; he succeeded there. At forty years of age he was an inspector._
> 
> -Victor Hugo, _Les Misérables_ , Volume I, Book Fifth, Chapter V "Vague Flashes on the Horizon"

"Thief! My purse!" The other side of the street exploded into a flurry of activity as the well-dressed gentleman grabbed the collar of the ragged, struggling urchin who had just picked his pocket. "Police!" 

Javert turned his coat collar up, bent his head down, and kept walking, no faster than before. It was best not to get involved. Sometimes the cops would pick up anyone who looked too poor, too suspicious, and a day cooling his heels in jail meant a day without loading work at the docks, and fifteen fewer sous to bring back to his mother.

Behind him he heard the heavy tramp of booted feet, and the urchin's indignant shrieks suddenly turned into sobs.

Javert was not surprised when a hand clapped down on his shoulder and the butt of a musket was shoved into his ribs. "Here, this one's probably an accomplice," the cop said, looking at Javert's face and grimacing. "Looks a questionable fellow, anyway."

"Bring him back to the station for questioning," said another, while Javert cursed inwardly. They would let him out in the morning, for he had done nothing, and had not even a centime in his pockets, but the lost wages would mean an empty belly for a day.

Javert spent the night in the cell in bitter contemplation. It cannot be said why this particular night in jail precipitated this decision in Javert’s soul, save that it did: he had been seventeen years in the world and in that time had known little but distrust and blows. His mother was kind enough, when she was not buried in a bottle, but kindness meant little to Javert. It had never done him much good.

He knew what the cops saw when they looked at him: ragged dark hair, a heavy brow, a great deal of jaw, the eyes of a beast of prey, a mouth made for snarling. Perhaps they were right, and he could not be anything but a criminal, even if he did not know it yet.

Certainly he would never be welcomed into society.

He saw two paths before him, each straight as a ruler: the one, to become one of the men who defended society by arresting those who attacked it.

The other: to become in truth what they thought him to be.

The night after they released him from jail, the virgin thief stole his first purse. He and his mother dined on roast chicken and Bordeaux wine.

By twenty, Javert led a gang that ruled the back alleys of Marseille.

At twenty-two, he slit his first throat.


	3. 1800. Toulon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to escape arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place. He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty, if being at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant, to quake at the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,—of a smoking roof, of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking clock, of the day because one can see, of the night because one cannot see, of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the evening of the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten nor slept for thirty-six hours._  
>     
> -Victor Hugo, _Les Misérables,_ Volume I, Book Second, Chapter VI “Jean Valjean”

In the fourth year of his sentence, Jean-le-Cric's chain-mate died of a lung-fever, coughing his life out on the next bench, every spasmodic movement jerking their shared chains so they chafed against Jean’s skin. He ought to have been in the hospital, Jean thought, but he did not say so to the guards who took away the body in the morning, with as much respect as they would have shown a dead dog.

His new chain-mate was named Eugène. He was a bluff, blond fellow from Arras, some years younger than Jean himself, and everything that Jean was not: garrulous where Jean was silent, charming where Jean was sullen. He had sweet-talked one of the guards, lynx-eyed old Père Mathieu, who distrusted all the convicts, into transferring him out of Room Three for fear of his life. Now he was chained with Jean and permitted to labor. It was curious, though, that he had been afraid of the other convicts. Eugène made friends as naturally as breathing; the chief of their chain said to anyone who would listen that a man like Eugène did not belong in Toulon.

“I am innocent, you know,” Eugène told Jean the first night. “My fellows only asked to use my cell to write; how was I to know they were forging pardons?”

Eight years’ hard labor for forgery and another three for trying to escape during his transfer to Toulon. He was probably lying about his innocence, but everyone lied in Toulon: it mattered nothing to Jean.

"What are you in for?"

"I stole a loaf of bread," Jean said, slowly, "and broke a window."

Eugène’s broad face was full of sympathy, and his brows lifted like question marks over his pale eyes. "You shouldn't be here, either, my friend," he said, clapping Jean on the shoulder.

Jean said nothing. It was the first time in four years that anyone had shown him sympathy. He could no longer weep. The only alternative was to rage, but he did not know where to direct his anger.

A day later, Jean woke in the the night to a hand on his shoulder and another clamped over his mouth. Eugène was leaning over him, and when he was certain Jean would not make a sound, he thrust a bundle of fabric at him and leaned close, whispering, “Wear these under your cassock, and wait for my signal.”

It seemed unreal, like a dream, but Jean managed to work his way into the clothing, and cover it up again with his ragged uniform. There was a trick to dressing while in chains, and a greater trick to doing it quietly, but Jean had mastered both, and no one awoke.

His heart was in his throat all the next day. If he was caught, he should be beaten. But he might be beaten at any time: for insolence, for working too slowly, because a guard had a bad day. This was a chance at freedom, and he could not pass it by. Eugène said nothing to him, but worked by his side in silence.

When the time came at last, Jean obeyed without question, in a daze; he slipped his chains and threw off his cassock and ran for the docks, Eugène a step ahead of him. He followed him abroad the docked frigate _Muiron_ ; he kept silent as Eugène convinced the cook that they were new crew; he followed when Eugène jumped into a boat and took up an oar, as if he had been commanded to do so.

It was not until they were outside of the city in the quiet of the piney mountains that Jean-le-Cric spoke again: “I would have been free in a year,” he said in a mournful voice, for now that the escape was done, the unthinking instinct of the caged wolf to flight had passed from him. Three days he had known Eugène, and in those three days his life turned upside-down! “What am I to do now? I cannot go to my sister, not as a wanted man.”

Eugène slung an arm across his shoulders, companionably, and his expression was not without sympathy. “Stick with me, my friend Jean, and I will take care of you.”

Jean bowed his head in acquiescence. What else could he do?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eugène-François Vidocq really did escape from Toulon in March of 1800, although I have glossed over the details because I frankly find all of his prison escapes sort of incomprehensible (Vidocq was a wizard?). And Jean Valjean's first escape attempt was in 1800...so I mashed the two together. Someday I'd really love to see a longer story where Vidocq and Valjean interact at Toulon.
> 
> Thanks to voksen for looking this section over.


	4. 1801. Brignolles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Jean Valjean's successive and obstinate attempts at escape would alone suffice to prove this strange working of the law upon the human soul. Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts, utterly useless and foolish as they were, as often as the opportunity had presented itself, without reflecting for an instant on the result, nor on the experiences which he had already gone through. He escaped impetuously, like the wolf who finds his cage open. Instinct said to him, "Flee!" Reason would have said, "Remain!" But in the presence of so violent a temptation, reason vanished; nothing remained but instinct. The beast alone acted. When he was recaptured, the fresh severities inflicted on him only served to render him still more wild._
> 
> -Victor Hugo, _Les Misérables_ , Volume I, Book Second, Chapter VII “The Interior of Despair”

It was late in the evening on a pleasant October day when the man knocked on the door of Monsieur Myriel the Curé of Brignolles. The man was dusty and tattered, but he took his cap off and held it in his hand before him, respectfully, as he waited on the step.

His name was Jean Valjean, and he had that day walked the nine leagues from Toulon to Brignolles. His feet, hardened as they were, ached; his belly cramped with hunger; and already he had been turned away from every inn in town.

But it was only the first day, he told himself, perhaps it would be different in the next town. What was the point, after all, of releasing a man from prison if there was nowhere that would take him in? He had been five years under the lash in Toulon for a loaf of bread and a window, and he felt, in the contemplative reaches of his soul, that he had more than paid for his crime. But what might come next for him was an immensity too great to contemplate.

He did not expect a kinder reception than anywhere else when he knocked on the door.

The gentle-looking old man who opened the door hardly had a chance to open his mouth before Valjean thrust at him a yellow passport. “You will ask for it anyway,” he said. “I cannot read, but I know what it says. It says 'Jean Valjean, discharged convict, native of'—that is nothing to you—'has been five years in the galleys for house-breaking and burglary. He is a very dangerous man.' That is why they will not let me even sleep in the stables at the inn. But I have walked nine leagues today from Toulon--I am on my way to Pontarlier, but I am hungry. I have thirty francs and fourteen sous in my pocket, everything that I earned in the galleys. I can pay. Please, monsieur.”

His eyes were dry, and yet there was something tearful in his face.

Behind the old man, a bustling woman in a black dress with lace at the throat gasped, catching sight of the visitor. “Come in, my brother,” the old man said, pressing the passport back into Valjean’s hand. It was the first gentle touch Valjean had felt in nearly six years, and he trembled. Without turning around, the old man said, “Madame Magloire, set another place for supper.”

The woman composed herself visibly and made as if to leave.

“Did you not hear me?” Valjean said, balking in the doorway like a horse at an unfamiliar stream. “I am a convict. You will have me in your house? Who are you?”

“Madame, you will make up a clean bed,” the old man said, and then, to Valjean, “I am a priest, and you are my brother. Come inside. You have walked a long way; come inside and rest yourself.”

Valjean ate the soup and bread presented to him by the woman in black, half-listening to the priest. It was the first time he had eaten white bread in more years than he could remember; the soup was simple but pleasantly flavored. The company made him uncomfortable; the wine made him sleepy. It was a relief to be shown to bed at last.

Once he was there, however, Valjean found that despite the mattress and blanket and the fresh white sheets, despite his bone-weary exhaustion, he could not sleep. Half-dozing, he could hear in the hallway the low murmuring voices of the priest and his housekeeper.

At last they were quiet. At last he slept.

He woke in the night when the cathedral clock struck two in the morning, his fatigue gone. The bed was too soft, the house too quiet without the clank of chains and the snoring of a hundred men. He was still fully dressed, with thirty francs and fourteen sous in his pocket. Tomorrow he would have to move on. He remembered how he had been turned away at the inn, earlier, and he thought of the silver on the priest’s table that night.

Such silver would, he knew vaguely from convict talk, serve to buy a new life. False papers, a new name, a new start. He was a thief, was he not? That was what it said on his passport. Who was he to defy that?

Yet the priest had taken his hand and called him _monsieur_ , shared his table and granted him shelter. And he thought of his sister and youngest nephew in Paris, struggling without him; and of the other children whose fate he did not know.

At last Valjean turned over, laid his head again on the too-soft pillow, and slept again.

In the morning, the housekeeper offered him warm milk and toast, with a slightly less nervous air, and he thanked her roughly.

“If you do not have to be in Pontarlier for some time, you might stay for a while,” the priest said, offering Valjean a pot of jam that looked untouched. The priest’s own toast bore only a scraping of butter. Valjean accepted the jam. “The garden could use some attention, and I am growing too old for pruning.”

Valjean looked up, with the wild gaze of the injured animal that fears its rescuer. “You wish me to stay--you offer me work. Are you not afraid I will do you harm?”

“That is the concern of God,” said the priest gravely.

Valjean said nothing for a long moment. He buttered his toast methodically, then applied jam. Both were novel to him. At last he looked up, with a pleading air. "Monsieur,” he said, “You have been very good to me--you are a saint--I should not ask for more, but I am not a saint. I have a sister in Paris, near Saint-Sulpice in the Rue du Gindre. Will you write a letter for me?"

"Of course, my brother," said the priest, smiling. "But come, I will teach you how, and next time you may write to her yourself."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because this is a short AU, not an epic, I'm handwaving past the fact that Valjean's itinerary to Pontarlier was set because being a parolee was not calculated to assist reintegration into society--presumably Myriel could pull a few strings or something, IDK.
> 
> At this point, Myriel was Curé of Brignolles (Brignoles). Madame Magloire may already have been his housekeeper, but Mademoiselle Baptistine had not yet come to live with him.


	5. 1802. Nîmes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _During his youth he had been employed in the convict establishments of the South._
> 
> -Victor Hugo, _Les Misérables,_ Volume I, Book Fifth, Chapter V "Vague Flashes on the Horizon"

Monsieur Abelin, the commissioner of the convict-guards at the galley of Nîmes, regarded the young adjutant-guard with an expression that was, as usual, well-mixed with exasperation. “Your report will be taken into consideration,” he said, closing the ledger on his desk with an air of finality. “You may go.”

The guard hesitated. He was twenty-two, tall and lanky, with hands he had not quite grown into and likely never would and a serious air that verged on the dour. Privately, Abelin felt he would benefit from loosening his collar and learning to drink with his fellows, but that was not the kind of thing you said to someone so keen. And the lad did do his work well, simply with a...zeal that could be both unsettling and inconvenient.

“Sir,” he said, straightening up like a soldier. Abelin almost expected him to click his heels.

He sighed. “Wait, Javert--”

Javert waited, perfectly calm.

“Your enthusiasm for your work does you credit,” said Abelin. “But I think perhaps you are wasted here. Have you considered applying for a transfer? Toulon, perhaps, or Rochefort. A man like you could rise far in one of the larger galleys.”

Javert was obviously taken aback; well, for all his probity, he was also a curiously modest man, and perhaps that seemed like ambition to him. “I will consider it, sir.”

He did consider it. Javert was not quite as modest as M. Abelin assumed, and he already knew he did not wish to be a prison guard forever. It was noble, to take charge of men who had betrayed society, to keep them from further evil and to correct them insofar as that was possible. But how much better would it be to to prevent the initial evil from taking place? Javert was content enough at Nîmes for the present, despite the contemptuous looks of the townsfolk, but it was true that a few years at Toulon or Rochefort would look well on an application for the police force.

He thought about Toulon, where he had spent much of his youth. It would surely be good for his career. He thought about it for three nights, lying on his narrow bed in the barracks and staring into the darkness. He did not much care to recall his youth.

The next week, he put in for a transfer to Rochefort.


	6. 1803. Toulon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Jean Valjean. He was a convict whom I was in the habit of seeing twenty years ago, when I was adjutant-guard of convicts at Toulon...”_
> 
> -Victor Hugo, _Les Misérables,_ Volume I, Book Sixth, Chapter II “How Jean May Become Champ”

Toulon in July was unpleasantly hot, and Javert found himself sweating in his wool coat and cap. The breeze off the harbor, although it stank of rotting fish, was the only relief from the heat, but today it was mild, hardly enough to dry his face for even a moment.

In the heat the convicts were slow and surly; stripped to their yellow pantaloons, their backs brown and scarred, or sunburned red and still unmarked by the lash, they moved as if dazed, and the guards used their cudgels more freely as a result. Even Javert, who ordinarily focused his entire being on his duties, was counting the hours until the convicts had their supper and the guards might at least have some shade. Evening would bring blessed coolness.

It was the heat that made him too slow to grab his cap when a sudden stiff breeze caught it up, whisking it off his head and towards the docks. Javert cursed inwardly, lunging towards it--if he lost it, the cost of a replacement would be docked from his pay, and it was not as if that was so great to begin with.

But another’s hand reached it first, scooping it up from the ground: a broad, callused hand, grimed with dirt and tar, a hand hardened by labor. Javert looked down and saw one of the men of the chain-gang holding out Javert's cap.

Their eyes met, for a moment. At first the eyes of the convict seemed blank and soulless in his weathered, twisted face. But there was in their depths a spark, and in his bent posture as he held the cap out, there was almost, almost something Javert would call mockery.

Javert's chest tightened. He took the cap, jerking it out of the convict’s hand. It was expected to strike the convicts for disrespect, but Javert could not quite convince himself that this man’s disrespect was unmistakable enough to warrant a blow. It would not be just to strike him if he meant no disrespect.

But as the convict held his gaze, Javert wanted to give him that blow. Oh, he wanted to. The hand which held his cudgel nearly itched to raise it. This urge in Javert horrified him: it was base and unworthy. There was cause enough every day to correct these wretches without stooping to petty cruelty for its own sake. Javert had never sought to be cruel, only to be fair, and to find that in his breast there lurked that depraved desire derailed the certainty of his honest mind for a moment.

Then he told himself that it was but a moment’s lapse; he had not acted upon it and so it did not signify. But he looked at the tin plate on the convict’s red cap and read the numbers there: 24601.

That one, he thought as he jammed his cap more firmly onto his head, it would be best to keep his eye on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and one time they did meet.


End file.
